'About the year 1000 B.C.
there was nothing distinctive about the Jews ethnically, linguistically,
politically or economically.'

N. Cantor (The Sacred Chain,
p52)

Jews worship Queen of Heaven

"Then ... all the people who dwelt in Egypt ... answered Jeremiah: “We will not listen to you! We will ... burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. For then we had plenty of food, were well-off, and saw no trouble."

– Jeremiah 44.15-17.

The rambling, repetitive book of Jeremiah is a collection of disparate material assembled no earlier than the 6th century BC.

Jews worship Tammuz

'Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD's house
which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for
Tammuz.'

– Ezekiel 8:14.

The Babylonian god actually
gives his name to the 4th month of the Jewish religious year.

Jews
Worship Anat-Bethel

Jewish mercenaries, garrisoned at Elephantine on the upper Nile
from the early 7th century BC, maintained their own Temple.

As a "treasurer's report" records,
the Judaean soldiers worshipped both Yahweh (Yahu) and his Canaanite
girlfriend Anat, despite
the prohibitions of Deuteronomy.

Mrs God

"At two sites, Kuntilet
Ajrud in the southwestern part of the Negev hill region, and Khirbet
el-Kom in the Judea piedmont, Hebrew inscriptions have been found
that mention 'YHWH and his Asherah', 'YHWH Shomron and his Asherah',
'YHWH Teman and his Asherah'.

These inscriptions, from
the 8th century BCE, raise the possibility that monotheism, as
a state religion, is actually an innovation of the period of the
Kingdom of Judea, following the destruction of the Kingdom of
Israel."

The
Moabite Stele - Large
slab of basalt that records King Mesha of Moab's defeat of Israel "which
hath perished forever".

– 9th century BC (Louvre,
Paris)

Back
Projection ...

"The Bible writers
projected backwards into time the kind of political rivalry that
was happening
in their own day [6th c BC] in order to explain that rivalry and perhaps
justify the Israelite position over current border disputes."

Magnus Magnusson (The Archaeology
of the Bible Lands - BC, p76)

Race is
a sensitive subject. To use the word almost invites the charge
of racism. Yet to understand the rise of Christianity
one must come to terms the people who were its original authors  the
Jews.

The
Myth of the Jewish Race

"Thus saith the Lord God unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and
thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite,
and thy mother an Hittite."

– Ezekiel, 16.17.

The Jews
claim themselves to be a race  but are they?
The earliest reference yet found to this singular people is on
a statue from the Syrian city of Alalakh, dated to about 1550 BC.
The inscription refers to hapiru warriors in the land of Kinanu  a presence confirmed by clay tablets
from Akhenatens capital of Amarna, referring to marauders
in the hill country of Palestine. The famous stele of Pharaoh Merneptah
dated to 1207 BC records 'Israel is laid waste, his seed
is not. 'Israel' here is a reference to a people, not
a territory.

The weight
of evidence suggests these original Hebrews coalesced
during the bronze age from successive migrations,
some from the periphery of the Nile delta (in Egyptian, Peru
or apiru meant a labourer) but most from across the Jordan and
Euphrates
rivers. In their own semitic tongue, habiru meant beyond,
suggesting an origin elsewhere. In Babylonian script khabiru referred
to a class of slaves. As a people, therefore, the Hebrews combined
Mesopotamian and Egyptian stock, almost certainly drawn from
the lowest social order, conceivably including runaway slaves.
One
migration, at least, brought with it a mountain/sky god  Yahweh
 destined for higher things.

Settlement in Canaan

As barbarous
newcomers to what was the land of Canaan, these semites (speakers
of a tongue common to Syrians, Arabs
and Mesopotamians)
took up migratory occupation of the less fertile hill-country of
the interior. Neither their limited sub-culture  an illiterate
donkey nomadism; nor their social organisation  patriarchal
and authoritarian  distinguished them from other tent-dwelling
pastoralists. These early, polytheistic, Hebrews scratched
an existence in an unpromising land on the fringes of the major
civilisations, occasionally moving with their animals into the
Nile delta in times of draught.

It seems as
if they were joined, over time,by outcasts or refugees from
the more sophisticated Canaanite (Phoenician) coastal cities. Israel emerged peacefully and gradually from within
Canaanite society  concluded Karen Armstrong, the
noted religious scholar. (A History of Jerusalem, p23]

Ethnic cleansing – by God's order

"And the Lord said to Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho,

"Say to the people of Israel, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their figured stones, and destroy all their molten images, and demolish all their high places; and you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it ...

But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as pricks in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell.

And I will do to you as I thought to do to them."

Numbers 33.50-56

The Canaanite migrants
brought with them cultic practices and images of their traditional
gods. A major Canaanite god was El, and the phrase El
has conquered gives us the word Israel. The Canaanite
god El had a ghostly presence in a host of Jewish heroes: Dan-i-El;
Ezek-i-El; Sam-u-El, Ish-ma-El, El-i-jah, El-o-him, etc.

God-inspired
names were common throughout the west-Semitic language region.
Other
Canaanite gods included Baal (a storm god)  also honoured
in a host of Hebrew names, Asherah (a fertility goddess, consort
of El), Shalem (a Syrian sun god  later to be honoured
in the name Jerusalem ), Milcom, Chemosh, etc. Rushalimum is
mentioned in records of the Pharaoh Sesostris III (1872 -
1847 BC)  the settlement actually pre-existent long before
the tribe of Hebrews made it their own. The site then appears
to have
been unoccupied for three hundred years until the Jebusites (otherwise
known as Kereti or Peleti  Cretans or
Philistines) arrived.

Polytheistic Jews?

YHWH
and his Asherah

"It will come as
an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a
female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted
monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount
Sinai."

 Ha'aretz Magazine, October, 1999

'Should you not possess whatyour god Chemoshgives
you to possess? And should we not be the ones to possess everything that Yahweh
our God has conquered for our benefit?'

"However, in the Second Temple period, the Shema‘ Yisrael text in Deuteronomy would have been read “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.”

The Shema‘ Yisrael was originally a monaltric statement; it stated that Israel had an exclusive relationship with its God, but it did not deny the existence of other national deities for other peoples."

Influenced
by these Canaanite cults, but
devoid of artistic or metal working skills of their own, the
early Hebrews adopted a way of honouring
their god of choice by genital mutilation. This sometime
practice of the Egyptian priesthood became, for the Jews,
a tribal obligation, part of the male regenerative organ offered
as a blood sacrifice to the jealous god Yahweh.
Other gods were worshipped but Yahweh demanded precedence.

For
generations, millions of babies were routinely
circumcised without anaesthetic – sometimes
using a sharpened stone. Even today infant deaths
result from this barbarous mutilation.

The
unkindest cut.

Thus though
the Hebrews were not a race, the males at least acquired a distinctiveness
from
other Semitic tribesmen who did not practice circumcision. Women,
regarded as mere chattels, were spared this mutilation.

In this
period of proto-Judaism, polygamous males acted as priests for
their extended families and kinship groups and exercised absolute
authority over wives and children. At some point in the tenth
century
BC the Hebrews were completely overwhelmed by the more advanced
Philistines, moving down from the north. Armed with iron
weapons and deploying chariots the Philistines scattered the
primitive
Hebrew
nomads into the hill country and a few austere places in the
Jordan River valley.

The various
Hebrew clans had no single warlord but were led by
tribal elders and shamans. The backward Hebrews remained under
the sway of their shamanic judges to a much later date
than neighbouring peoples. Theirs was a harsh culture of scapegoat sacrifice
and collective and inherited guilt (eye for
an eye vengeance). As marginalised pastoralists they were
acutely xenophobic and demonized the city dwellers and farmers.
With the ebb and flow of empires over centuries, and the endless
movement of peoples, we might have expected this marginal tribe
to have passed into history, along with countless other peoples,
assimilated into a greater multitude.

Sacred History

But we have a story, a tale of tribal fidelity  with
frequent, and instructive, lapses  to a protector god Yahweh,
who had chosen this people as his very own. For
them, he has a divine purpose. In particular, their migration into
Canaan is given an heroic re-interpretation. No longer
do we have piecemeal migration over centuries but a single
glorious
conquest
by a cohesive people. The idolatrous city dwellers (of
Jericho, etc.) get their comeuppance and the whole
land is promised to the Jews in perpetuity. They have, it would
seem, arrived as a single group from Egypt, released from slavery
by divine intervention.

The extraordinary thing about this history - complete
with verbatim dialogue between man and god - is that it was not
written until more than a thousand years after the supposed events.

Records one historian,

"The
first millennium of Jewish history as presented in the Bible has
no empirical foundation whatsoever."

– Cantor, The Sacred Chain, p 51.

The impressive
race history, tracing the Jews (the people of Judah), back through
Hebrews
in Canaan and Israelites in Egypt, to a noble ancestor called Abraham
(father, it seems, of all the races, including Greeks and Arabs!),
and the whole melodramatic story of the Exodus, was concocted
at a much later date, after the tribal leadership of these
Judaean tribesmen had been taken into exile and had learned the
rudiments
of civilization from their Babylonian captors. This was not at
the dawn of time but in the seventh century BC, when Greece
was
already a civilization and Carthage had a maritime empire.

Earliest
Jewish writings:
9th century

There was
no written Hebrew before the 9th century BC. At that
time, the Hebrews adapted the Phoenician script.

Phoenician
Alphabet (alternates)

The original
Hebrew/Canaanite occupants of Palestine did pass into history.
Many, including
the so-called lost tribes of
Israel (those living in northern Palestine) were assimilated
by Assyrian conquerors during the eighth century.

But
the victors, a Persian-sponsored priesthood who settled in Judaea in the 6th century BC, wrote a sacred history, known
to the Jews as the Torah (or Pentateuch ) and
to the Christians as the
first 'five books' of the Old Testament. Together with the 'Prophets'
and 'Wisdom' literature this voluminous text purports to be an
account of the
trials and tribulations of the
Jews through
the
previous
two millennia.
Rather oddly, its detail and obvious accuracy peters out the closer
it approaches the time when it was actually written. Joshua,
supposedly
on the rampage in the thirteenth century BC gets vast reportage,
whereas several 7th century kings known to history are omitted.

Indeed, the
four hundred years between the last book of the Old Testament
(the 5th century Malachi) and the first book of
the
New Testament echo in a biblical silence.

No biblical text gives
the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great (in 323 BC) a
mention.
Ptolemaic Egypts loss of her Palestinian provinces to Syria
in 198 BC is unrecorded. 'Minor' personages like Julius Caesar
and
Pompey the Great are overlooked. And the books of Maccabees 
which should tell us the recent story of the successful
Jewish rebellion against Greek rule in the second century BC  are
so blatantly filled with error and incoherence that even biblical
editors shunted them into the Apocrypha or
omitted them entirely.

But of course
we are not speaking of
history but rather, of sacred testimony, designed to control,
justify and
inspire.

Anyone can be factual. In the Bible we have a book with a purpose.

"Lachish
Letters" – only first
hand 'evidence' for the entire corpus of the Old Testament

A
Few Bits of Crockery

"They
have entered the land to lay waste ... strong is he who
has come down. He lays waste."

Church
organisation, authority and membership preceded
rather than followed the justifying doctrine. As
the organisation and its needs changed so has the ‘Testament
of God’ adapted accordingly.Dogma –The
Word in all its Savage Glory